RUUD BREULS

Period

Genre

Ruud Breuls

Ruud Breuls (Urmond, 4 December 1962) is a versatile jazz trumpeter and studio musician, who has been on the Metropole Orchestra’s payroll since 1996. He is featured in the orchestra’s trumpet section, and plays all the jazz trumpet solos. As a studio musician he can be heard on countless albums. Full biography

Instruments

bugel, flugelhorn

Mentioned in the biography of

Biography Ruud Breuls

Ruud Breuls (Urmond, 4 December 1962) is a versatile jazz trumpeter and studio musician, who has been on the Metropole Orchestra’s payroll since 1996. He is featured in the orchestra’s trumpet section, and plays all the jazz trumpet solos. As a studio musician he can be heard on countless albums. He continues to play in jazzclubs and stars as a soloist on the CD Shades Of Brown, an homage to the untimely deceased trumpeter Clifford Brown.

Played in

1975 - 1987

Ruud Breuls grows up in the province of Limburg, and like most brass players in the south of the Netherlands he joins the local brass band, Fanfare Sint Martinus, in the village of Urmond. His father and two brothers were already in the band as trumpeters. At the age of thirteen he comes under the spell of jazz, when his brother takes home an LP by Count Basie. He would later call the band from the late fifties, with trumpeters Thad Jones and Snooky Young ‘my favorite orchestra’. After high school he takes up studies at the Rotterdam Conservatory, where he initially studies both at the classical and jazz departments. His jazz teacher Cees Smal advises him to switch to the Hilversum Conservatory (which would later merge with the Sweelinck Conservatorium to become the Amsterdam Conservatory).

1988 - 1995

Breuls is awarded the 1988 Wessel Ilcken Prijs, an incentive prize for young jazz musicians, not to be confused with the precursor to Boy Edgar Prijs as major Dutch jazz award. The trumpeter himself is enthusiastic about his teachers Cees Smal and Rob Madna; the first teaches him first and foremost to ‘play beautifully’. ‘This is what music is all about: tastefulness, playing beautifully. The most important thing is that you’re able to express an atmosphere. Cees taught me that. Cees will always be with me,’ he says in 2003. Madna, a piano teacher who also plays a little trumpet, equips him with ‘a sense of harmony and melody’. Breuls graduates from the Hilversum Conservatory in 1988. Two years later he is appointed as a teacher at the same school. In 2010 he is still on the staff of the Amsterdam Conservatory. In addition to his jazz practice he soon becomes an in demand sessions player. With the Stylus Horns, a four piece wind section, he accompanies popular singers like Marco Borsato, René Froger and Gordon.

1996 - 2011

The trumpeter has become one of the most in demand Dutch sessions players, and in 1996 he is appointed as solo trumpeter to the Metropole Orchestra. The versatile Breuls, who has no ambition to perform as a leader, and considers group play just as important as soloing, if not more so, takes to this new position like a fish to water. With the orchestra he is involved in large-scale productions featuring Bob Brookmeyer, Vince Mendoza, Bill Holman and Mike Abene, among others. He also manages to become a regular member of Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw and the Dutch Jazz Orchestra, with which he will record a number of forgotten works by Billy Strayhorn. The past few years have seen Breuls performing in jazzclubs with two quintets: pianist Edgar van Asselt’s Major League and pianist Cees Slinger’s Buddies in Soul. He rarely records as a leader. This alone makes Shades Of Brown, an homage to Clifford Brown, featuring the Metropole Orchestra’s strings, an important album. Breuls shows us all that he is made of: Brown’s elegant, impeccable bebop, ‘playing beautifully’ as taught by Cees Smal, and Freddie Hubbard’s fire. The latter is his ‘all time hero’.

In the discography you will find all recordings that have been released listed chronologically. We restrict ourselves to the title, the type of audio, year of publication or recording, label, list of guest musicians, plus any comments on the issue.